By Steven Tucker, European Conservative.
Moral vanity is the sin into which we can all too easily fall when our ethical model becomes one of fleeing evil, not imitating goodness.
t turns out the Devil has a birthday. It falls on this very day, 20 April, which represents 137 years since the birth of Adolf Hitler.
Traditionally, the idea that Hitler was literally an incarnation of Satan upon Earth has been the preserve of mentally ill cranks. One less overtly disturbed voice identifying Hitler as being the Führer of the Flies, however, has recently emerged in Professor Alec Ryrie, a Scottish academic and professor of the history of Christianity, whose interesting book The Age of Hitler: And How We Will Survive It was published late last year. Unlike the loonies, Professor Ryrie does not mean such an identification to be taken literally. His basic argument is that, as Christianity began to decline across an increasingly atheistic post-war Western Europe and America, a new, correspondingly secular replacement appeared, an undeclared ‘Religion of WWII,’ whose chief presiding deity was not a Christ or a God-substitute, but a Satan-substitute instead: Adolf Hitler.
Ryrie shows how, following WWII’s end, certain theologians, influenced by the murdered German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, felt ashamed of the way in which certain elements within Europe’s Christian churches had acquiesced or collaborated in Nazi rule. What was supposedly needed instead was a ‘religionless Christianity,’ wherein the heavenly ethics of Christ were separated from the failed institution of His earthly Church. In practice, what this meant we got in its place was a mere empty vessel, a heretical political pseudo-religion.
Ryrie notes the 1965 Hollywood biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told flopped in cinemas, and not only because of John Wayne’s comically inappropriate cowboy accent; by this point in time, the true greatest story ever told for the majority of the Western public was no longer that of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but the classic three-act history of WWII, a narrative many cinema-goers had actually lived through. The main reason for the new narrative’s success was simple: in Adolf Hitler, WWII had the best, most easily boo-able franchise villain, a real-life Darth Vader, only somewhat less black.
Yet there was a problem here. By basing our new religion upon the neo-Devil, not the old God, mankind began no longer to aspire towards the goodness of Jesus but away from the evil of Adolf—which is to say, towards nothing much in particular.